Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  SATURDAY

  D minus 25

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  The joy of Friday night was short-lived, quickly dampened by a major news story.

  Saturday morning’s sobering development wasn’t a refutation of either the audio footage which exposed Richard Walker’s role in the bugging or the video of Dan finding the folder, though, as Emma had previously considered the worst case scenario.

  No; what she saw on Blitz News before either of the brothers were awake was much more harrowing than that.

  Friday had been a very late night and Emma felt a little worse for wear after more celebratory drinking than she was used to. Dan passed out and had to be carried to his bed by Clark, who quietly kept the party going long after Emma called it a night on the couch. She didn’t expect to see either of them walking anytime soon.

  Not yet aware of the overnight developments, Emma walked into the kitchen for a drink to ease her dry throat. With only one bottle remaining of the fancy lemonade everyone liked so much, Emma left it for Dan, expecting that he would wake up feeling a thousand times worse than she did. She instead took one of the many bottles of Houghton’s Home Fresh cloudy apple juice and relaxed back into her groove on the couch, which she found comfortable if a little short. She couldn’t imagine how Dan, nearly a full foot taller than her, ever managed to sleep on it.

  Emma turned on the TV and immediately felt a lump in her already dry throat. A collage of smiling faces filled the screen, which only ever meant one thing.

  There were four rows of victims: six in each of the top and bottom rows, and four in each of the middle two rows. In the centre of the middle rows there was an image four times larger than any of the others.

  The middle-aged man in this central image had narrow eyes and wispy white hair. Unlike the other photographs, his looked to be a mugshot.

  Emma’s tired and dehydrated brain counted the faces individually.

  Twenty, plus one.

  He had to be the perpetrator of the attack, she thought, and surely there were too many victims for it to have been a shooting. The banner headline at the bottom of the screen — “Horror At Hemshaw” — didn’t offer many clues.

  Restless to know where Hemshaw was and what had happened there, Emma shifted her weight in preparation for the effort of standing up again to get her phone from its charging point beside the TV.

  As the time on the screen changed from 08:59 to 09:00, Blitz News didn’t cut to its usual bulletin. The anchor did, however, acknowledge the time before announcing that the full seven-minute recording of the incident was about to be replayed. “This footage contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing,” he warned. “Needless to say, Blitz News does not condone the views or actions of Christopher Jordan.”

  Within milliseconds of the first frame appearing on the screen, Emma knew what she was looking at: a mass suicide.

  Christopher Jordan, the man from the central picture, stood in front of a makeshift altar, barefoot in an all-white suit and with two white stripes painted under each eye. The footage looked to have been shot in a dingy and ill-lit barn or storage building.

  Emma knew more about this kind of thing than she would have liked to, having studied Jonestown and other lesser-known incidents of its type during her time at college. As charismatic as they were sinister, cult leaders who could talk their followers into committing suicide or murder were in many ways the ultimate influencers. As such, their speech patterns and mannerisms had long been studied by marketers and politicians, even if few would admit it.

  Jonestown’s victims had numbered in the high hundreds, eclipsing Hemshaw in terms of scale. But the Jonestown tape, as haunting as the crying children and the brainwashed adult voices were, didn’t show the victims. Unlike this Hemshaw video, it didn’t show bodies contorting on the floor as others formed an orderly queue to take their own sips of the clear liquid their white-suited leader was liberally pouring into plastic cups.

  Christopher Jordan’s voice was undeniably hypnotic. Before anyone else appeared on-camera, he explained why “this regrettable course of action” had been necessary. The catalyst, to Emma’s dismay, was Dan’s leak.

  In an authoritative tone that left no doubt that the man believed his own madness, Jordan provided the context of an intergalactic war between two alien races. One, the Kamanoids, were “evil beyond our understanding of the word.” The Benorians, meanwhile, were a peaceful race who often communicated directly with Jordan. He claimed that his recent attempts at communicating with the friendly Benorians had been “blocked by an unseen force” and that the last message he received was a warning about an upcoming Kamanoid invasion under the guise of a friendly visit.

  Jordan then spoke in graphic terms about the fate which would befall anyone still alive when the Kamanoids arrived, urging others to “seek the sanctity of death while you still can” and even going so far as to call for parents to “fulfil your duty of care and express your love by giving your children the solace of a peaceful passage before it’s too late.”

  Aside from everything else she was feeling, Emma couldn’t believe that Blitz were irresponsible enough to air this part of the video. As insane as Jordan’s suggestions and as laughable as his intergalactic war stories sounded to Emma, he presented them in a sufficiently assertive and polished way to concern her that unstable individuals might sit up and take notice. After all, twenty of them already had.

  And Emma reflected again on the importance of the fact that Jordan’s call to action wasn’t coming across through a cryptic note or grainy audio; this was HD video of a well-spoken man calmly and articulately stating his absurd position.

  As Emma tried to ignore selfish thoughts about what this was going to do to Dan’s public image, her mind instead turned to wondering just how unstable or vulnerable Jordan’s victims must have been to buy into the level of nonsense he was spouting.

  This question was quickly answered.

  “Marlena, my love,” Jordan called towards the camera, extending his hand. A young woman walked forward, at least fifteen years his junior and with the unmistakable hollow cheeks and desperate eyes of an addict. She stumbled slightly as she walked. Jordan kissed her on the forehead, promised that everything would be okay, and handed her a cup full of whatever poison he had chosen for the job.

  Marlena grasped the cup in two hands and drank quickly. Jordan pointed to a spot on the floor. Marlena slowly sat down and crossed her legs. By the time the next victim was at the altar, Marlena’s head was on the ground and her body was convulsing.

  “Come, come,” Jordan said, calling more people forward. “Three at a time.” Each of these next three victims were thin and wore the same vacant expression that Marlena had. Jordan poured their drinks, handed them their cups, and pointed where to sit.

  This pattern continued. With only two victims remaining, Jordan urged them to hurry up. He addressed the camera again, referencing the fact that he was live-streaming the group’s “peaceful passage” and that he knew it wouldn’t be long until the police arrived. He made a cryptic comment about taking them with him “if that’s what they want”, but reaffirmed that he would rather go peacefully.

  With the final two victims writhing on the ground and most of the others now disturbingly frozen in contorted positions, Christopher Jordan poured his own drink. “Sirens,” he said, looking around. He smiled, only slightly. “Too late.”

  Jordan then walked towards the camera, stepping away from the altar for the first time. Emma’s heart sank when she saw what was stuck to the front of the altar: a picture of Dan.

  It was media’s go-to photo, taken from his appearance on Focus 20/20. There were two other photos — Hans Kloster and a woman Emma didn’t recognise — as well as symbols from various incompatible religions and belief systems. Had this happened four of five days earlier, Emma reflected, Blitz would have been calling for Dan’s crucifixion for causing so many deaths.

&nb
sp; Christopher Jordan signed off with a final warning about the “unspeakable horrors” which would soon fall upon Earth’s inhabitants. He then drank his own poison and placed the camera on the floor to capture the exact moment of his death. His head eventually settled on the ground, facing the nearby camera.

  Slightly disturbing, Emma thought. Slightly?

  No more than twenty seconds later, police officers broke through the door off-camera. After a brief view of one officer’s feet at close range, the video cut out.

  Back in the Blitz News studio, the anchor revealed that the responding officers found “a significant arsenal of weaponry” in an underground shelter and also discovered evidence that multiple buildings at the Hemshaw Gardens site had been used for large-scale production of methamphetamine.

  Emma heard one of the bedroom doors opening and turned to see whose it was. She hoped it would be Clark’s so he could see the news and assume the responsibility of telling Dan.

  It was Dan’s.

  * * *

  Dan walked into the living room, shielding his eyes from the daylight with one hand while the other lay on his stomach. “It feels like my stomach is full of wet cardboard,” he groaned.

  “It’ll pass,” Emma said. She stood up to guide him towards the kitchen.

  He looked over to the TV and tried to focus on the rows of images which had returned to the screen. “What happened to Christopher Jordan?” he said, squinting to make out the smaller faces. “Is he dead?”

  “You know this guy?” Emma asked. She gave up on the kitchen idea and fell back on the couch.

  “I know who he is.”

  “Who?” she pushed, keen to get Dan’s view on Jordan before he found out what the maniac had done.

  “He’s bad news,” Dan said, leaving it at that. “Is he dead?”

  Emma patted the couch, inviting Dan to join her. She told him as succinctly as possible that Jordan had killed himself and taken twenty vulnerable-looking people with him, using the apparently imminent hostile invasion as his justification.

  Dan looked at the screen quietly, still studying the faces of the dead while the anchor ran through their names and backgrounds. Now sobered up as abruptly as Emma had been, he asked the first question in his mind: “Did he say anything about Billy?”

  “Billy?” Emma echoed. “Kendrick? What does he have to do with anything?”

  “Good. Did he say anything about me?”

  Emma thought for a second. “I don’t think so, but there was a picture of you. Kloster, too, and someone else I didn’t know. Do you want me to rewind to it?”

  “Is there a clip?”

  “The whole thing,” Emma said. “It’s pretty graphic.”

  Dan turned his head towards the kitchen. “Get it to the part with the picture and pause it. I don’t want to see anything else.”

  Emma respected his wish, and the fact that he had it. “Okay, there it is.”

  “That’s his wife,” Dan said. He turned away again.

  Emma turned the TV off. “It looked like he was with a different woman. Is his wife dead?”

  “Officially missing,” Dan said, air-quoting the second word with his fingers. “He said she was abducted, but he killed her. Billy grilled him about his story once and there were holes all over the place. It never went to trial because there was insufficient evidence and she didn’t have any family or anyone else to push for it.”

  “That picture was a mugshot, though, right? So they must have suspected him of something…?”

  “DUI,” Dan said. “Nothing else.”

  After a few moments of silence, Emma turned away from the blank TV to face Dan directly. “None of this is your fault,” she said.

  “I know,” Dan said quietly. He stood up. “Thanks, though.”

  * * *

  As Dan ate a light breakfast in the kitchen, Emma took a look at how ACN was covering the Hemshaw incident. The newsreader relayed a short statement from President Slater, promising a full investigation into how Christopher Jordan had been able to build up such a large stash of illegal weapons and such a sophisticated meth lab without being on the authorities’ radar.

  Slater also expressed her condolences to the families of the dead and urged news networks to rethink their decision to air the grisly footage. She didn’t acknowledge Jordan’s stated justification or the pictures of Dan and Kloster. Emma wasn’t sure what to read into that.

  ACN then reminded their viewers of Prime Minister Godfrey’s earlier comments.

  “Dan,” Emma called. “Godfrey.”

  Dan ran through from the kitchen.

  Unlike Slater’s written statement, Godfrey’s was a short video recording of him at a mahogany desk. He had made no public comment about the leak since prematurely declassifying Britain’s UFO files on Tuesday, instead leaving John Cole to respond to the Kloster letter’s detailed revelations. Dan was eager to hear what he had to say.

  Godfrey expressed his deepest condolences before reverting to type and implicitly blaming President Slater. “Government lies breed citizen paranoia,” he said, “and questions should be asked of those at the top.”

  The way Godfrey shifted gears wasn’t unlike his speech at the Manslow Monument, when he turned the anniversary of an industrial disaster into an opportunity to score points.

  His response to the mass suicide at Hemshaw ended with an appeal to the American public: “While you send your thoughts and prayers to the victims’ families, try not to let this tragedy quell your hunger for the truth or forget how much Dan McCarthy has risked to bring us all so close to it.”

  “I don’t want him on our side,” Dan said.

  “I know,” Emma sighed. “Me neither.”

  The Horror At Hemshaw, as everyone was now calling it, dominated the news cycle all day. A few minutes here and there referenced the previous night’s more positive developments, but the networks seemed to revel in the tragedy. Profiles of the victims filled most of the cycle, complete with eulogies from sobbing friends who told familiar stories for each victim. A pattern soon emerged of homeless addicts and former sex workers taken in by Christopher Jordan for reasons that weren’t yet clear. Many speculated that he used them as disposable partners in his drug business, but some of the pop psychologists who appeared on TV throughout the day argued that sociopaths like Jordan often sought followers for the sake of having them.

  Clark, when he eventually woke up, was less enthralled by the coverage. “People die all the time,” he said after Emma explained why she looked upset.

  “Not in mass suicides,” she replied.

  “Exactly! These idiots chose to go.”

  “They were vulnerable people. How can you be so cold?”

  Clark shrugged. “I’m guessing no one’s ever died in your arms, staring into your eyes and fighting for one last breath. Because once you’ve seen that, it’s not so easy to feel sorry for people who decide to stop breathing.”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “And I’m not judging anyone,” Clark interrupted. “But don’t ask me to cry for them, either.”

  Emma didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Anyway,” Clark said, raising his eyebrows and shifting gears blatantly enough to make William Godfrey blush, “is there a beach at the place we’re going to in Italy?”

  “Uh, probably nearby,” Emma said.

  “Sweet. I’m going to the mall to get some stuff for the trip. Anyone want anything?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dan said.

  “And you won’t need the car?”

  Dan shook his head.

  Clark grabbed his coat and left.

  “Wait, is he okay to drive?” Emma asked after a few minutes.

  “It’s three o’clock,” Dan said.

  “Yeah but he was practically drinking until the sun came up.”

  “He’s a big guy,” Dan said. “It takes a lot. And obviously I wouldn’t let him go if there was any doubt. Not that he would.”

&nb
sp; “I was just checking.”

  Dan didn’t say anything, annoyed by the insinuation but not wanting to make a big thing of it.

  After another hour or so, ACN aired an interview with someone who used to live with Christopher Jordan at Hemshaw Gardens, thirty miles east of Sioux City. The woman, who didn’t want to be identified, said that “cult” was the only appropriate word to describe the group and that Jordan hadn’t shied away from using it.

  “He said cult was the world’s name for people whose knowledge scares them,” the woman said, her face obscured and her voice morphed. She went on to say that she and many others had worked in the site’s two main meth labs until they were too exhausted to continue. “But we had nowhere else to go,” she said, slowly and weakly. “And he told us he loved us.”

  The woman went on to say that Jordan had been talking about a “mass exit” for a long time and that he was always looking for a justification. This eased Dan’s conscience slightly, since he no longer felt that his leak had been the cause. The catalyst, perhaps; but not the cause.

  Clark returned after another few hours with supplies for their trip to Italy, now just a day away. He handed Dan some earplugs for the flight and a pocket-sized Milan guidebook. “Pizza tonight?” he suggested.

  Emma and Dan supported the idea, Dan more animatedly.

  Clark called to order the pizzas then sat down in his armchair. “Have you two been watching this all day?” he asked.

  “Pretty much,” Dan said.

  “This stuff’s not good for—”

  Dan waved his hand to silence Clark. “Kendrick,” he said.

  Sure enough, the exclusive comment from Billy Kendrick that Emma, Dan and millions of other ACN viewers had been waiting for was finally here.

  Billy’s face was weary, like his skin weighed twice as much as normal. He was in an otherwise empty hotel conference room, sitting at a long wooden table.

  Billy shared his memories of Christopher Jordan, who he described as “the second most hostile guest I ever had on my show, after Joe Crabbe.” He retold how Jordan had screamed at him for being a government shill and accused him of working with the hostile Kamanoids to pave the way for a global takeover. Billy shared his admittedly unqualified opinion that Jordan’s obsession began with the abduction story he concocted to get away with killing his wife, and that Jordan’s mind slowly began to “believe its own BS” as a way to cope with the guilt.